The NBN is as useful as those newfangled Beta tapes

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REMEMBER those rabid Beta-tape aficionados of the late 70s and early 80s?

You know, the ones who swore they had found the one true technology and held firm to their allegiance as the video library shelves became chock-a-block full of VHS tapes and the beta tapes were relegated to a dark, dingy corner out the back before disappearing altogether.

“Beta’s better!” they would cry in frustration. And technically, it could be argued they were right. Problem was, consumers voted VHS with their wallets. And Beta, despite its small band of loyalists, died as a mainstream technology.

Just 30 years later even VHS has gone the way of the dodo and its successor, DVDs, are rapidly on the way to obsolescence, with hard drive and flash disk technology offering the compact convenience consumers want.

This Government kind of reminds me of the Beta ideologues.

Their commitment to spending $36 billion of your money over the next decade to roll out fibre-to-the-premises technology with the National Broadband Network flies in the face of logic.

Labor’s claim that the NBN will “future proof” Australia seems naïve in the extreme. Does Senator Conroy really believe that this cumbersome cabling to homes will be the technology that consumers want in 20, 30 or 50 years? It’s unlikely to be what consumers want in a couple of years – much less the 10 it is expected to take to roll it out.

It doesn’t even seem to be what consumers want now. The two NBN test sites in Australia have been connected to some 6,000 premises, but currently the NBN has only 41 active customers. Seriously. A 0.68 per cent take-up rate - hardly a case-study in consumer demand.

But, just like those Beta ideologues, Labor is sticking to its guns. But, honestly, what good is a product – whatever its merits – if no-one is buying?

With perhaps this in mind, Labor is paying Telstra an extra $12 billion or so to rip up all their copper network so folks will have no alternative but the NBN. Even the Beta extremists didn’t advocate the destruction of the all Super 8 films!

Like Labor’s other big policy dud – the carbon tax – it all seems a little pointless. And expensive. And with negligible benefits.

I don’t claim to be an expert. But American Steve Perlman is. He developed Apple’s Quick-time media player software (something those original Beta-heads would have been impressed by) and he’s now announced a new wireless technology – DIDO – that has the potential for internet download speeds to be 1,000 times what they are currently while not suffering the current performance degradation caused by the number of wireless users.

Importantly, it’s wireless technology – the sort that allows people to access the internet through their smartphones or laptops wherever they are. The sort consumers want.

True, DIDO is not available right now. But neither is the NBN – except to those test areas where people just aren’t joining up.

Does anyone really believe, given the massive leaps in internet technology we’ve seen in recent years, that this new improved wireless will not eventuate? In fact, it will probably be sooner rather than later.

Question is, how many billions of dollars of taxpayers money will be wasted digging up streets and laying new cables before this Government realises that the NBN is an expensive waste and consumers are voting with their wallets for more convenient, appropriate and affordable technology?